The Chicken Quilt

It really started out with these dinner napkins.  I made 30 of them and gifted away two dozen.  I had only six left.  The fabric is 100% cotton and very soft.  Every time I looked at these six napkins I kept seeing a quilt.

The fabric was 45 inches wide and my dinner napkins are 20" x 20".  So I ended up with 24 3.5" squares.  I have a magic closet in my craft emporium that is floor to ceiling fabric.  I looked high and low to find fabrics for the chicken quilt.  I wanted a nine-patch using as many colours from the napkin as possible.  I went back to the fabric store trying to find more red chicken fabric but of course they were sold out.  So I found another chicken fabric with a green barnyard country background.

My daughter Shannon designed the layout on paper, then we meticulously cut out the strips and pieces.  Unfortunately, when the piecing was done on four different sewing machines at stitch n bitch, I neglected to calibrate every sewing machine to make sure all the 1/4 inch scant seams were identical.  What ended up happening was the blue and white nine patches were not all the same size. 

By the time the problem was realized over half of the larger nine blocks were finished.  So I squared the big blocks to 10.5" instead of 11".  The inside and outside boarders are square.  If you look real close you will see that some of the small nine patch blue and white blocks are not square.  Ooops. It is a queen size quilt with 100% cotton batting and flanelette backing.

I was short six red chicken blocks, two of my dinner napkins were cut up for the cause.  Then I had an extra block so I made a matching pillow.  The pillow was my first attempt using welting string.  I looked it up on the net and thought I can do that.  Well it was not quite as easy as it looked on the net.